Louis Dumont never made it to the NHL, but the former junior star never and found a home in minor pro hockey, where he’s played for 17 seasons.

Mississippi RiverKing Louis Dumont won a Memorial Cup with Kamloops, but never made it to the NHL. He is a career minor leaguer who has played in nearly 1,100 games over 17 seasons.

By:Paul HunterSports Reporter, Published on Sat Jan 29 2011

The stars, from Jarome Iginla and Shane Doan to Darcy Tucker and Steve Passmore, would flicker across the television as the young couple channel surfed NHL games one evening almost 15 years ago in Lafayette, La.

As each would shimmer on the screen, Louis Dumont would repeat the same line to his future wife.

“I played with him … I played with him … I played with him,” he’d recite, hearkening back to his Memorial Cup winning season for Kamloops in 1994.

“Louis,” she finally said. “Are you the only player off that team that didn’t make the NHL?”

Dumont, one-time junior star from Red Deer, laughs heartily at the memory as he prepares for another weekend of games for the Mississippi RiverKings.

Dumont never made the NHL. Never made a six-figure salary. Never had his meals brought to him on a charter flight.

But Dumont also never quit playing.

Instead, he’s had a lifetime of wearing the sweaters of various minor-league fauna. Whether it be as a Thunderbird, a Tiger Shark, an IceGator, a Lynx, a Sea Wolf or a Grizzly, Dumont has found a home each season through 17 years in minor pro hockey.

Sunday, when the NHL’s biggest stars take to the ice in Raleigh, Dumont will be celebrating his 38th birthday in a Memphis suburb at the other end of the pro hockey spectrum, wondering if he’ll still be playing when No. 39 ticks off the calendar.

Probably. He’s not the longest serving minor-leaguer — though his 771 games in the East Coast Hockey League do rank him second in that loop — and he’s not the oldest but he is representative of those players who refuse to give up on the game once the NHL gives up on them. Shinny addicts who can’t walk away even after that dream dies.

“I never played in the NHL but I made wherever I played kind of the NHL. It was my NHL. I get to come to the rink every day and have my games. I don’t get paid like they do for sure but it’s my dream,” he said, explaining his hockey stick-to-itiveness in a telephone interview.

“When you’re 16 or 17 and dreaming of playing in the NHL, you think your world will end if you don’t make it. But I’ve taken so much from the game, so much gratification out of it. It’s still just a game when I’m out there playing; whatever league I’m playing in. I still really, really enjoy it, all facets of it. I just love going to the rink every day.”

Though the details are different, Dumont’s story isn’t much different than the hundreds of Canadians who carve out a living on ice rinks in such far-flung outposts as Hildago, Texas, Prescott Valley, Ariz., or Loveland, Colo., in the low minor leagues. Dumont, in fact, has a better pedigree than most.

He once led the WHL’s Regina Pats in scoring – 62 goals and 121 points in 1992-93 – but by that season he’d already been passed over twice in the draft and the NHL scouts had moved on from the 5-foot-10 forward as they looked for the next big thing. His skills earned him an invite to a couple of NHL camps — Montreal and Hartford — which left him with great memories but no job. He even caught on with Canada’s national team, under coach Tom Renney, in 1994 but got bumped when an NHL lockout made higher-end players available.

It might have made some players bitter but all that mattered to Dumont was that people were willing to pay him — just $325 a week that first season with the ECHL’s Wheeling Thunderbirds — to continue playing the game he loved.

And Dumont never grew tired of the rhythm of the game, the off-season workouts, training camp and the possibilities of a new season, the stretch drive, the attempts to grow a playoff beard.

For 17 seasons, almost 1,100 games — five games in both the AHL and IHL representing the zenith of his pro career — on a dozen different teams, Dumont has laced them up, mostly in the deep south. Never missed the post-season in all those seasons; left the ECHL in 2006 as that league’s all-time leading scorer.

It’s been a good life. Dumont earns enough that he and his wife Hayley own a 1,800 square-foot, four-bedroom home in the Memphis suburb of Southaven, where the team plays and they are raising two young children.

Teams in the Central Hockey League, where he is now, operate under a salary cap of about $11,000 a week for an 18-man roster.

The minimum pay is $335 per week for a player with less than 25 games pro experience, $375 for those over it. Veteran players like Dumont might make as much as $1,500 a week. Housing is supplied for those that need it while Dumont, who has a home, receives $700 per month toward housing.

Dumont’s most lucrative stretch might have been when he played for the Pensacola Ice Pilots for two seasons a decade ago. He had a contract that paid him $1,400 a week in season and half that during the summer when he’d stay in town to do team promotions. A year-round housing stipend of $1,100 a month, however, gave him the security to take on a mortgage and buy a house.

“If you’re a young guy and you have your car paid for, all you’re paying for is gas, your cellphone bill and some food. You can get by just fine,” he says.

Dumont says the lifestyle is “quite civilized” with comfortable lodging (no one sleeps on a couch) a luxury bus for road trips (though the 24-hour jaunt to Denver is tough) and a generous supply of sticks and other equipment. The players have a union but Dumont said the teams tend to “keep players happy” anyway.

Players receive $30 per diem for meals when on the road but, when at home, team sponsors often help players out. He recalls, when playing for the Louisiana IceGators in Lafayette, one restaurant gave each player a credit of $400 per month. But that team was hugely popular, drawing an average attendance of 12,000 per game. Both the Fifth Estate and Hockey Night in Canada came down to do features on that southern hockey phenomenon while he was there.

Beyond making a living at something he loves, Dumont says there are other less tangible, less explainable reasons to keep going. Like the bond the game creates between a father and a son. Louis Sr. comes south from Alberta for two weeks every year, always watching games from the offensive zone, moving after every period like he did when junior was a boy. Hockey is their instant connection, always has been.

Then there is the fact, Dumont says, that he’s never known anything else but the game. He’s recently begun to work as an insurance broker to pave his way to retirement but, unlike the college grads who come and “live the dream” for a few years before moving on with their lives, he really never had a backup plan.

“I didn’t go to college. I played junior and then went right to playing minor professional hockey. It’s not like I could say, okay, I’m going to go and work in business management for this company; I’ll just put my resume out and get a job like that.

That just wasn’t going to happen for a guy like myself,” he said.

“So I did something I loved. These leagues afforded me the opportunity to be able to play and live comfortably. I never made six figures per season but it was enough to live on every year and to enjoy the lifestyle.”

So would he recommend it for other young players?

“You get two kinds of guys down here. Either guys who played college or junior. The college guys I see, they come play a year or two, have a good time, it’s almost like a continuation of college for them. They get their fill and then they have something to fall back on,” he explains.

“The junior guys, they don’t have a lot to fall back on. They’re going to do whatever; go back home and work in whatever industry is around where they’re from. My advice to them would be to give (hockey) a go. It all depends on your passion. If it’s something you really want to do and get out of your system, when you’re young and healthy, I think you should do it.”

But, as Dumont can attest, some never can get hockey out of their system.

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